Just went for a walk up to the Iglesia of Guadalupe where they are already starting to celebrate the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe two days in advance. The cobbled road that rises to the church is bannered with red and white and green flags that hang down like Mexican crocodile teeth and intersect and crisscross with strings of glowing light bulbs.
Outside the church people were gathered around vendors of the traditional foods: tripe tacos, tamales, pozole, ponche. The ponche (punch) from a styrofoam cup was hot and sweet with flavors of guayaba, orange, hibiscus, tamarind, sugarcane, cinnamon, and apple.
Mass was being given to a full congregation inside the church, the holy electric light pouring out over the steps and me peering in just as the priest raised a white disk of bread symbolizing the body of Christ and intoned sacred Spanish words into a microphone. They normally leave the church doors open here, so passing by an evening service is not unlike passing a theater where a film is showing. A woman in front of me was kneeling on the stone, the best seat she could get.
On my roundabout return I bought a copy of Juan Rulfo’s “Predro Páramo” for sixty pesos and later wandered into the little video arcade off the Jardín that I have passed a hundred times. Teenage girls with streaks of pink in their dark punk hair huddle on the steps smoking cigarettes and sharing a secret joke that goes round and round.
Inside the arcade I came face to face with Chun-Li, the coquettish Chinese character in Capcom's "Street Fighter."
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